Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• I guess I didn't look hard enough last week: Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a site devoted to balloon molecules, using the same balloons that balloon artists twist into weiner dogs. The gallery contains lots of examples, from simple tetrahedra through Fullerenes and DNA, so don't miss it!
• A neuroscientist calls BS on the Singularity. (Ok, the dialect of Singularitanism spoken in the vicinity of Ray Kurzweil.) What He Said.
• Using a laser sintering process (admittedly, on bigger parts than we're used to seeing) some guys at the University of Southampton have created a 3-D printed UAV with a 6' wingspan. 3-D printing sidesteps some of the difficulties of manufacturing certain shapes, including elliptical wings. (Thanks to Aaron Spriggs and half a dozen other people for the link.)
• Here's a gallery of home-brew tube projects that's one of the best I've seen. Take special note of the homebrew coil winder (design by Gingery) that made many of the designs possible. Here's another link for the same writer.
• There is a NaNoWriMo alternate held in August. I think it really needs to be held in March (which I've considered the worst month of the year for decades) but nobody asked me.
• There was once a special phonograph record technology designed for use under car dashboards. It failed epically. I couldn't stop vinyl records from skipping at home; one wonders what it would take to suppress skipping in a car on crappy Chicago streets. RCA created a different under-dash machine that played standard 45s, but by 1962 they'd all faded out with tailfins, waiting for the impending Age of 8-Track.
• Back in the day we sometimes Scotch-taped pennies on the tonearms of cheap record players to minimize skipping, and later wondered why the records started sounding crappy after awhile. (I think the term was "three-penny record." I had more than my share.)
• Oh, dear. There may be an emerging film/fiction subsubgenre called "Fantastic Catholicism."
• Here's a nice short piece on some new research on airborne dust and its effect on atmospheric carbon levels. We're finally getting a little hard data on the subject.
• "Wipe that grin off your face, Herr Luther." (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)